Saturday, September 10, 2011

A week after 9-11-2002 I participated in a collage workshop at Sitka Center on the Oregon Coast. I was still reeling from the enormity of the terrorist attacks, from the images I had seen on my television; I think of nothing else, so three of the first pieces I made that week referenced the events.

I used one of my "writing that can't be read" sheets as the background, to represent the debris-filled skies. A striped paper referenced the walls of the World Trade Center, standing and falling. Bingo cards referred to the numbers of the floor and to elevators. And of course, there's the fire and the smoke, and the pain of loss.

Art Tip: Removing acrylic from hands

Use ordinary hand sanitizer to quickly remove acrylic paint and medium from your hands. The alcohol in the sanitizer dissolves the acrylic. Wipe well with a paper towel and then wash with soap and water.

Art Tip: brush cleaning

As I work with acrylic medium for glue or with acrylic paints I stand my brushes in a bucket of water on my work table and give them a soap and water cleanup every day or so. But eventually my brushes get gunky and sometimes I forget to clean them. That's when I clean them with Murphy's Oil Soap. I keep an inch of MOS mixed 1:1 with water in a tall plastic tub (Feta from Costco) and put caked brushes in that solution overnight. By the next day the soap has softened the brush and with a bit of elbow grease I can get the brushes back to useable. This also works for brushes used with oil paint. I gave up using oils but wanted to save those good brushes and Murphy's Oil Soap came to the rescue. Get it at the grocery store.